#but as we've gone on with the franchise- it's just been getting harder and harder to listen to and I really hate saying that..

[chipistrate]

Augh- how do I word this,, I don't want to get too deep into this cause it's not something I care enough to talk too deeply about, especially not publicly.

Prefacing this with; I have absolutely nothing against Matpat and this isn't about WHAT he says in his theories, it's about how he theorizes.

He gets stuff wrong. Like- a lot. Not that his theories are wrong- but he gets details about stuff blatantly wrong and uses the misinformation to support his theories, and a lot of what he gets wrong is from the books, which makes people believe him more easily cause not as many people are going to take the time to actually read them and instead just listen to what Matpat has to say.

He uses stuff from media that we've been explicitly told to not use to form the very base of his current theories, and he's so insistent on using the stuff from said media in all of his theories, whether they're about the games or the movies.

He bases his theories off his previous theories and sometimes makes wild leaps to try and justify his them, he theorizes as he plays the games, he grabs the tiniest details to try and say he was right, and he never really takes a step back from the web of theory upon theory to try and look at the series from the viewpoint of what it is, instead of what he's crafted it to be.

I won't say he's objectively wrong in the theories he ends up with, because truly we don't know for a fact, but what he's crafted from the misinformation to the using stuff from media we're not supposed to use is wildly different from what we're being shown in the games and it can be hard to listen to,,,,

And it sucks because I subscribed to him ages ago specifically for his fnaf theories- hell, he was the reason I got into fnaf in the first place. But how he's been theorizing recently has been hard to watch as a long time fan.

MatPat makes one video for each of his four fucking channels every week is it fair to call him a content farm like DUDE GIVE IT A FUCKING REST YOUR THEORIES ARE GARBAGE AND WOULD BE BETTER IF YOU ACTUALLY TOOK TIME ON THEM

[ben10-lostandfound]

What Lost and Found Means To Me

Hello again, everyone! I apologize for the lack of content in recent months, it's honestly become harder and harder to find new material, especially without there being a current Ben 10 series to focus on. This is the longest time we've had without an incarnation of the show running since the hiatus between Omniverse and the Reboot!

So I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this blog as a whole. I've been doing this since I was about 16 or 17, I'm 24 now. That's kindof crazy, huh? And granted, the place has had ups and downs, more recently downs due to a lull in the content, but that doesn't mean I'm not still working on stuff behind the scenes. I'm still trying to find another home for my research, a more permanent home that I have better control over how the content is presented.

I'm also trying to get into game development so a certain project from my past, prior to 2016, can finally come to fruition. But we'll get into that another day... hopefully.

I had an interaction last night with a follower who reached out to me about who the painter was for the alien stills featured during the Original Series, as their university had asked for art pieces that inspired them to pursue art. Of course, I answered "Andrew C. Robinson", which the answer was met with huge thanks.

That's always been part of why I do this, you know? To put a spotlight on all the artists and other incredibly talented people that make (or made) this franchise come to life in the various ways it has. Not just Dave Johnson or the late Derrick J. Wyatt, but everyone.

There could be so much more out there that I don't know about or have access to, or could be tucked away in the distant, obscure links of the Wayback Machine, or somebody could come forward with something rare like the Leapster Exclusive Concept Art, but I'm just one silly girl with a blog. You'd be surprised how much work goes into looking for this stuff!

But I'm glad my contributions to the fanbase haven't gone unnoticed. From people like KuroTheArtist, all the way to just a handful of people who work on the show itself, I'm grateful I've gotten to leave some kind of mark.

Don't take my wording as like, meaning I'm going to stop though. This isn't a "I'm done with this" type post. As long as there's still material out there to find, I'll keep this going for as long as I'm able.

-Rahk-Zi: Galvan Archivist Extraordinaire, A.K.A. Roxanne Stones, Ben 10/CN Lost and Found Moderator.

[ironianknight]

Unnecessarily Elaborate Critical Thinking About God of War

Greek Pantheon Kratos jams a gate with a living woman to get to the other side (she wasn't a combatant, wasn't a monster, wasn't directly related to the conflict, and probably didn't deserve what happened to her).

Norse Pantheon Kratos spends the entire second game accommodating his travel companion's special needs (look how he brings Mimir up from his belt and holds him in hand from the custom made sling he built to more stably and comfortably hold his head from, for any moment or thing of interest, even just some writing on a monument, wall, or stone tablet).

I understand why some people have problems with how massive the shift was. It still makes sense, and was still a cool high-level-writing direction for the franchise to go in. I can honestly say I have no regret that the story went in that direction.

I can still say I regret the loss of the original series' heart of bombastic, mob-clearing gameplay across sprawling cinematic and active set pieces as if life is one giant action flick and we are the metronome it times to.

That said, it was never just action at play, in the series. It was also drama, and that's been well preserved. I just feel that the game developers were too caught up in the modern game design doctrines that FromSoft and the many great indies that followed them turned into the new standard. A template where every enemy is capable of ending you, even the most basic and weak can single-handedly dispatch you, because the point of the gameplay is to reward martial skill with survival-

That's just the thing. The God of War should not be struggling to survive a group of bandits. Not under any normal circumstance. The failure in the Norse saga team's design was that in following the dramatic side too heavily, we lose the spectacle and glory of facing off against the literal mythology of the world you're playing through. The camera is down and intimate with our protagonist to emphasize the newfound importance of people in the eyes of our stoic Dad of Boy, and that's good, but making each encounter significantly smaller than the hordes Kratos fought in the original series brought an unavoidable lowering of the sense of scale and stakes.

This is particularly apparent in Ragnarok, for the record. The intro fight with Baldur, interacting with Jormungandr, unlocking the temple of Tyr, The undead giant in the final boss sequence, those were great and added some of that much needed spectacle. Smaller harder battle segments still injured the vibe, but it felt more forgivable when Kratos was still throwing entire buildings around when needed.

The sequel is where things got bad. There weren't many particularly impressive set pieces, and most of the enormous living things we encountered were non-hostile. The gods, too, were robbed of scale. Can you honestly say the fight against Odin felt different from a battle with a particularly powerful wizard of no greater significance? And Thor, his character was about being washed up, but seriously, aside from the storm he arrived in during his first appearance, he was just a strong guy with electric flavored normal attacks. If it weren't for the names slapped onto this cast, I feel like I could forget that these are gods warring at the end of the world rather than mid-tier superheroes on this month's hair-raising serialized climax!

That's the only true pity I feel about where the modern games have gone. It's great, and I like it... but don't forget your roots, or you'll leave behind some of the original fans, too. As we've already seen happening.

[lord-radish]

Oh yeah I finished Tears of the Kingdom. I'll talk about the story in a future post, this one should be fairly spoiler-free aside from mechanics.

First of all, I made a post back when I started the game about how I don't want Breath of the Wild to be displaced by Tears of the Kingdom. I don't think Breath of the Wild should be seen as a glorified tech demo - not only for the effort that went into making that game in the first place, but because it devalues what that game did on its own merits.

Having played Tears of the Kingdom, I can safely say that the slow, calm, melancholic vibe of Breath of the Wild is kind of gone. Like it still exists a little bit, you're still clambering over hills and gliding over valleys between human settlements, but between the three biomes and the Gloom chasms everywhere and the new creation feature, everything's a lot busier and it's harder to sit back and take in that sort of atmosphere.

That being said, Tears of the Kingdom is incredible. It's jam-packed with story and gameplay functions that are a lot more robust than Breath of the Wild. It takes the wide-open nature of that game and busts what was already a groundbreaking sandbox game wide open, increasing verticality both ways and giving you unprecedented locomotive tools to get around.

I was thinking about Jak and Daxter because I've been revisiting the Snapcube streams of the first game, and as much as I love that game, I realised that it had finally hit a set of limitations that made it "old" in my mind. Like, Jak and Daxter is an incredible open-world platforming game. We're talking a seamless open world that looks and runs fantastically. That game has better tech for rendering shadows than most games have had for the past 20+ years.

But then I thought about Jak doing Ascend, and in comparison to Tears of the Kingdom, Jak and Daxter just seemed rigid in comparison. And that's fucking nuts, because JnD is one of the most fluid games ever! But something like Ascend breaks the mold.

The creation system is unbelievable. The powers set a new precedent for freedom. Like seriously, fucking Ascend? They give us physics powers that let you stick physics objects together and make bikes and cars and ladders and springpads and all this crazy shit - they give us fucking FLYING MACHINES, WITH STEERING - and THEN they add a power that lets you DIVE THROUGH THE CEILING TO GET ON TOP OF ANYTHING IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING GAME????????? That's genuinely unbelievable.

I played 75 hours of this game. For me, that was enough. Getting to the ending was a bit of a slog, but it came after like 70 hours of total, unabashed fun and freedom to do what I wanted. I could have finished the game in like 40 hours or less if I rushed, but that would have hurt my experience with the game. I ebbed and flowed according to my own whim, and it took me all the way through Tears of the Kingdom.

I don't know how Nintendo keeps doing it, but they keep setting new standards for the open world genre. It's close to being a masterpiece on all fronts.

So after this, what do I think they should do next?

Personally? I don't think I have a third BotW-like left in me.

These games are unbelievable on all fronts, but I think this little sub-franchise within the wider Zelda franchise has run its course. Between 2017 and now, we've actually gotten three Zelda games set in this era - Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity may have been a side-game in a different genre, but that's a fully realised game in the same setting as Breath of the Wild.

The games look great, but I think the aesthetic of these games has gone as far as it can go. Story-wise and gameplay-wise, I don't see how they can follow on from Tears of the Kingdom.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm content. I've had my fill. I still need to play that Hyrule Warriors game, actually, but once that's done I think this era of Zelda has done everything it needs to do. What's up next? How are they gonna approach the setting from this point forward? I want to see something new.

[breadknight-likes-things]

Bread's Top 5 Of 2022 #2: God of War: Ragnarok

God of War 2018 was a huge triumph in the reinvention of a franchise, and God of War Ragnarok brings that reinvention to a close in just two entries, and you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. There's a lot of stuff in Ragnarok that I'd love to just type out full force, but because I would be absolutely remiss to spoil anything about this roller coaster ride of a game, I'm going to try and keep this post about as spoiler free as possible. Both from a story and a mechanical standpoint. Suffice it to say, mechanically God of War Ragnarok isn't all that different from God of War 2018. Action is still the new, Souls inspired behind the back brawls, and the moment to moment action feels fairly similar to the last game most of the time. Given how rock solid the action was in that game though, I don't perceive this as an issue in the slightest. Throwing and recalling the Leviathan Axe still never gets old, if you were wondering. What's harder to talk about spoilers on, but I have to mention, are the performances of the characters. There were so many ways this sequel could have gone with the new characters and faces it introduces, along with the returning cast from the first game, and it ignored the easy way out with all of them. Every character, even ones that you may have a poor first impression of from their stated characterization in the first game, or their first appearances in this game, hide tons of interesting layers, and never quite wind up being the character's you may have expected them to be. Above all others, I have to single out Richard Schiff's turn as Odin. This franchise could have so easily just wholesale copied the idea of Odin as the story of a burly old king we've seen so many times, but Schiff brings a wholly unexpected energy and feeling to the role. An energy that I won't spoil here, but one that continues God of War 2018's incredible streak of finding interesting new ways to portray characters that could have otherwise just been one note archetypes.

I doubt we'll see another God of War game for quite a long time, but if Ragnarok is the note that we're ending on, consider me wholly satisfied with the way this franchise refresh turned out. As someone who's been playing this franchise since it was the hottest new game of 2005, I don't think I ever expected to be thinking about the story and characters of a God of War game as hard as I've been over the last couple of months. I'm glad that I am though, glad the entire Sony Santa Monica team could achieve this vision, and glad that I got to play it.

[luveline]

Thank you so much! Okay so I've been working there for just shy 4 years and have been a manager for 1 year. The store has gone through a lot of GMs in my time there, but he's the only one that I've actually had an issue with. From the second that he started he has done nothing but run the store into the ground. Within his first 2 months our entire night crew quit because of him harassing them about call outs and taking time off, but they were kids okay? They were about to graduate and had a lot of things to do? It wasn't like he was never told in advance. He is always scheduling people outside of their availability and gets mad when they don't show up at their scheduled time. I've always worked opens, but just recently he decided to put me on closes without consulting me about it. There is no communication from him ever. If you try to ask him about something, he will either say I don't know or just flat out ignore you. There was one morning that I went in and the store was actively flooding. I called him and my supervisor multiple times with no response. Eventually I texted him to come get his store because it was flooding. He texted me back an hour later and his response? "What?" He didn't call me back, didn't try to find out if it was under control or if we were open on time and then actually showed up 20 minutes late. It was dumb luck that someone from Maintenace had shown up to look at something and helped me shut the water off. He hired this one guy who started sexually harassing all of the girls, including myself. He was in his 30s and most of these girls were barely legal and not even out of high school yet. He refused to ever actually do anything about it and eventually the guy got fired for not showing up. AND THEN HE HIRED HIM BACK. He's so rude and passive aggressive all the time and it makes everyone so uncomfortable. He's always making mistakes and then blames it on everyone else. We've been having problems with money going missing from the safe, drawers being short, and he always goes to me about it even though he knows it don't happen on my shift. Doesn't matter if I worked that day or not, he jumps down my throat about it. I've never been confrontational, normally I would just stay quiet and let these things happen because I don't want to upset anyone, but this has been really taking a toll on my already fragile mental state. I don't really want to leave, my team has been my second family and I don't want to abandon them, but I feel like it's something I really need to do. It's not really acceptable here for people to go over their boss' head to upper management, but I don't know what would be appropriate. What makes it harder to do is that my current supervisor is very new to the company and I would rather speak to someone more familiar with myself and my boss because I feel like they would have a better understanding of the issues, but I don't want to in turn go over her head either and make her feel like I don't trust her. It's common practice for our franchise to rotate GMs, but it's always done at random and we never know when it's gonna happen. I'm looking for another job now, but I'm unsure if I should just stick it out here and wait for him to be replaced, or if I should just jump ship and move on.

Absolutely I think you should jump ship! I've only had one job and it wasn't a career so please take anything I say with a huge pinch of salt. I really wouldn't know what the best course of action is for you BUT but but I really think what's most important is your well being and it feels like this guys is just throwing you into mental and actual danger. I'm so sorry to hear about the sexual harassment you've been experiencing, and it sounds to me that your boss is really mistreating you and it is not okay, you deserve the best and I don't think anything is worth such a huge sacrifice of your happiness. But of course its never as easy as just quitting. I really am so sorry, I hope that whatever you do you'll feel happier!